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Healthcare workers vs. the virus: an interview with a hospital janitor fighting at the front

Janitors are essential workers yet they are at the often the most underappreciated and least paid in the healthcare system hierarchy. Here, Norell Martinez interviews a healthcare worker who is battling COVID-19 daily, but is one of the thousands of frontline, “essential” workers—many of whom are immigrants—whose labor and stories of sacrifice go unrecognized.

While much attention is being paid to doctors and nurses working on the front-line of Coronavirus crisis, little attention is being placed on the cleaning staff that work in medical facilities.

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The Democrats: blood-stained party of imperialism, war, and oppression

That time has come again, it comes every four years, when people tell us it is our duty to vote…to vote for the lesser evil, to vote against the Republicans, to vote for the Democrats. Right now, some people are enthusing over Democrat Bernie Sanders, that great hope for liberals.

Many justify their support of Sanders by stating that he will push the Democrats to the left, take them back to its “progressive” roots. The truth is that the Democrats are not the party of lesser evil and its roots are far from “progressive.” It is not an ally of labor and the oppressed, and it never was. The Democratic Party is the other party of the Anglo-American ruling class, it is a party that enforces mass incarceration and mass deportations, wages imperialist wars, and supports bloody dictatorships abroad. This is what the Democratic Party is – a capitalist, imperialist party.

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How to win a rent strike

This communique is specific to the current conditions facing tenants in San Diego, California, but applicable to renters everywhere. There are specific reasons why tenants go on a rent strike, and there are ways to win. Just like workers in labor unions, tenants use the rent strike as a method to apply pressure and gain leverage in negotiations versus ownership/management. Tenants typically use rent strikes to demand repairs, negotiate better contracts (i.e., lower rent increases), and to protest against abusive management.
Rent Strikes can be effective when they are well-coordinated and based on a sound argument. Uninhabitable living conditions, requesting repairs that have gone unaddressed for over sixty days, gouging rent increases, threatening/bullying/abusive management and landlords could all be valid reasons for conducting a rent strike.

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Fighting for justice while feeding the nation: Farmworkers at the frontlines

Here in Washington State farmworkers are being asked to continue working. On the east side of Washington where the majority of farms grow apples, cherries, and pears, there are currently about 5000 workers that have come through the H2A visa program. That number is supposed to go up to over 20,000 when they reach peak harvest. We have seen just how exploitative this program is to workers.

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Bailouts are class warfare

The global capitalist economy has quickly stumbled into recession, a process already unfolding before the COVID-19 pandemic came into full view. The effects of the spreading virus have led to rolling closures and shutdowns to large swathes of different international economies, inducing a full-blown crisis that is now breathlessly impacting people across the world.

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Somewhere together

Somewhere another dimension perhaps oil and water mix effortlessly and we can hold them both at once land, theirs 
is ours now, is stateless somewhere another stateless dimension perhaps red earth is free.

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The continental repression of Central Americans: interview with Víctor Interiano

I feel that within the imagination of most people who are neither Salvadoran, of Salvadoran descent, or Central American, El Salvador as a nation, people, and culture is a blank book with only four bookmarks for reference: the civil war, present-day mass migration, MS-13, and pupusas. 

One of the greatest misconceptions and purposeful misrepresentations that has been constructed around El Salvador (and in general, Guatemala and Honduras) is a perpetual and contradictory dichotomy of simultaneous victimhood and criminality. 

In the United States we are either pitiable victims of war, political repression, or poverty as long as we remain within our lands. But the moment we migrate, we become MS-13 terrorists and invaders that merit no asylum. 

What is known about Salvadoran history and culture, even among progressive or leftist circles in the U.S., is largely informed from solidarity work around the 1980s civil war and interactions (between mostly white college students) and representatives of various liberation fronts. 

Today, at times, it feels like many of our friends and allies still don’t know us.

This characteristic of being unknowable is not of our choosing or making. It is an unfortunate side-effect of the willful ignorance that comes with being absorbed into and propagating the hegemonic white supremacist culture of the United States. 

Which is unfortunate, because to know us is to understand that Salvadorans are born fighters. Resistance is in our blood, from the anticolonial rebellion led by Anastasio Aquino in the 19th century, to the 1932 Indigenous Uprising, to the 1944 National Strike that brought down a dictatorship; we are a people in continuous mobilization for justice. 

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Black Beans: Afromexican and Blaxican music to listen to year round

The history of Blackness in the Americas is deep rooted, even while largely dismissed by official institutions and national governments. The musical and political exchange between Black and Mexican peoples throughout history and despite borders, has also resulted in many beloved music genres, from Son Jarocho to Cumbia, Rock and Hip-Hop.

This playlists includes Son Jarocho, Cumbia, Ballads, and Hip Hop from and influenced by AfroMexican and Blaxican music in the US and Mexico.

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Who Are You?

You ask yourself what is that?
Es una mezcla de la cultura Africana y Mexicana.
I come from a linage of former African slaves that arrived on the shores
of Veracruz along with Cortez para la conquista.

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Against All Odds

Against All Odds is a VR experience that focuses on creating empathy by means of light, sound, and a minimalist approach to materiality. The user experiences this world from a child’s perspective as they attempt to escape from a holding facility, only to walk into a hate speech rally and be followed by menacing, faceless figures. This VR piece embodies the narrative of “children in cages” in an effort to expose the user to an ongoing humanitarian catastrophe at the U.S. Texas border that is fueled by the hate rhetoric of the current U.S. administration.

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